In Phoenix, a Choir Sings the Reservoir's Falling Line

PHOENIX — On Thursday evening a 60-voice community choir performed a piece whose melody traces, note for note, twelve months of the city's reservoir readings — a rising-and-falling line that the audience recognized before the program notes explained it. The work, titled "Waterline," was composed by local music teacher Daniela Reyes-Cortez, who set each month's gauge level to a pitch and let the drought write the tune. "I did not have to add sadness. The data had its own," she said before a hall of some 400 residents, many of whom live under the same rationing the score describes. The performance is part of a season in which artists across water-stressed cities have turned civic hardship into public ceremony — a way, Reyes-Cortez said, of grieving and enduring in the same room. The choir closed on the year's lowest note, held long, then released. The silence after, one attendee said, was the loudest part.